“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

The Yąnomamö word for
poor, hǫri, translates literally to “out of
tobacco.” Sometimes, when you insist you’re hǫri to discourage a beggar, they
take you to be saying just that. A man who came looking for a machete once grew
exasperated at Lac’s declarations of impoverishment, and, looking disgusted,
turned away and exited the hut, leaving the tobacco wad from his own mouth on the table. The
Yąnomamö share with each other direct from their own mouths like this all the
time, out of one and right into another; it’s no wonder epidemics tear through
villages as fast as they do.

Much of the Yąnomamö’s
garden space is devoted to tobacco, and they start tucking the wads beneath
their bottom lips the moment they roll out of their hammocks in the morning by
age seven or eight—it’s hard to tell anyone’s precise age. Tobacco is also an
important trade item whenever they travel to neighboring villages for feasts.
Many a time, Lac has heard some Yąnomamö complaining about his cravings—because
he was truly hǫri—and, knowing something about the struggle himself, laughed
his most sympathetic laugh.

But tobacco doesn’t qualify as a currency;
they don’t trade it in place of other valuables. It’s merely a commodity.
Still, Lac sees how, with a few adjustments, the culture could potentially
evolve to use the crop as the basis for an abstract system of exchange, with people calculating the value of every purchase in the number of tobacco wads perhaps. This
would be a clear instance of the larger society evolving. It’s like language:
speaking is only adaptive if there are listeners, and using tobacco as money
only works when everyone accepts it as such. Dr. White and Dr. Service insist
this society-wide cultural evolution is the proper focus of anthropology. In
this, they’re carrying on the traditional thinking that harks back to Emile
Durkheim, the original sociologist. But doesn’t natural selection operate at
the level of the individual organism, in this case the individual human?
Cultures, to be sure, develop over the course of their histories and in
response to shifting ecologies, but that type of change is quite distinct from
the change wrought by the eternal struggle for survival and reproduction.

Quite distinct? Then why,
he wonders, are you having so much trouble disentangling the two threads? For
entire societies to evolve organically, wouldn’t there have to be entire
populations of them competing with each other, some leaving more offspring than
others? That’s clearly not what’s happening when a culture transitions from,
say, consuming tobacco as a commodity to using it as a currency. But both
sociologists and a seeming preponderance of cultural anthropologists discuss
such phenomena in just these terms. If large groups compete to recreate
themselves over the generations—but what constitutes a generation for a
population of societies?—then what role does competition among individuals
play? Or are individual minds the environment in which the competition of
cultures takes place?

Lac smiles, giving his
head a subtle shake. It was handing over the cash for a bundle of cheap
machetes that instigated the train of thought. He’s come to this hardware store
to get as many steel tools as he can get his hands on before packing everything
up and starting the trip back into Yąnomamöland tomorrow. Manufactured goods
also have obvious practical value to the Yąnomamö, and these tools are in fact
passed along as items of general value among people who already possess one or
two of the items in question; each individual knows that other individuals will
find them valuable even when they themselves don’t currently need one. Might
machetes become a currency?

Laura is waiting outside
by the car with Dominic and Kara, the car they borrowed from the Hofstetters,
whose patriarch in nowise resembles the Hollywood heart-breaker Lac has been
living in dread of, but he and his wife are plenty charming and kind
nonetheless. Still, Lac wishes their help wasn’t so indispensable to his family;
he feels their kindness—irrationally, he knows—as a rebuke, evidencing his inability
to provide for his own wife and his own children. The sense of powerlessness is
made worse by Lac’s recent discovery that Laura is burning through his grant
money from the National Institute of Mental Health like wildfire—they’ll be out
of cash by August unless they start budgeting more prudently.

Laura, it turns out, has
acquired a fondness for the wine on offer in the low-end grocery stores of
Venezuela’s capital city. After piling the machetes in the trunk and sliding
into the driver’s seat, he puts the key in the ignition, exhaling as he tries
to think of the most delicate way to broach the topic again.

“When you said we’d be
going to study some primitive culture in the Amazon jungle,” she says to
preempt him, “I never imagined it would mean me waiting for you with the kids
on the campus of a giant research institution.”

He knows she’s right.
He’s marooned her here. The living quarters at IVIC are splendid though. Laura
has admitted she loves the view of the mountains. It really is a beautiful
facility. “Chuck will be back in the village soon,” he assures her, sounding
more confident than he has any right to sound. “When he gets there, I’ll feel
better about bringing you and the kids to the village.”

He tells her again about
the myriad dangers—insect bites, snake bites, dysentery—and about how many sick
children there always seem to be, but he hasn’t told her much about the risks
posed by the people themselves. That, he doesn’t know how to explain to her. He
doesn’t know how he’ll explain it to anyone. It sounds like a reprisal of the outdated,
pre-Boaz colonial themes, meant to justify pacification,
a euphemism for conquest. “You should see the hut I’m building,” he goes on as
he pulls onto the main road. “There’ll be an attic so we can sleep where it’s
cool and dry. There’ll even be an indoor shower if I get the damned thing to
work.”

Do Yąnomamö raiders understand,
he wonders, that white nabä women are off-limits? Clemens has brought his wife
to the village before; he’ll have to sound him out on the topic of how safe he
thinks it is for women and children.

Many of the roads in the
outskirts of Caracas are barely worthy of the name, but at least, for all the
compromised throughways and all the maniacs careening toward inevitable
collision, they still drive on the right side. Lac has been enjoying his time
behind the wheel of the Hofstetter car; most of his conversations with Laura
occur with her in the passenger’s seat as he goes from store to store preparing
for his return to the field. Whenever the topic is serious, her instinct is to
look at him directly, open the sensory dimension of their eyes and expressions,
intensify the sharing of the remaining time blocked off for them. She’ll put
her hand on his knee when they’re stopped at an intersection, squeezing his leg,
and he’ll look down, seeing the ring he slipped onto her finger in a church
back in Michigan, back in that past life, back in that other world, the one
that seems more fantastic by the day. His gaze moves from her hand up along the
length of her arm, the texture of her skin causing a stir beneath his sternum,
that radiant flesh with its whiff of all things properly feminine and familiar.

“Lac, is there something
you’re not telling me,” she asks him, “something about the Indians?”

Looking her full in the
eyes now, seeing in them a new set of clues in the case against his fitness as
a husband, he says, “I don’t even know how to begin telling you about the
Indians. I thought at first they were like overgrown children—and they still
strike me like that sometimes, children with machetes and bows and arrows.” He
catches the light changing from the corner of his eye and turns back to the
road. “Sometimes, though, I think there’s something more authentic about the
way they live, less constrained by all the affectation and propriety we labor
under. Is it childish to throw a tantrum? Or is it, I don’t know, dishonest
somehow not to throw a tantrum when you feel like it? Lately, I’ve been having
this disturbing sense that they’re not really as different as I’ve been looking
for them to be. They’re just people—people brought up in what to us are bizarre
circumstances, but people nonetheless. It’s an unwelcome thought because it has
me questioning my own responses to everything, making me realize there’s some
belief or value driving them—beliefs or values that can’t be justified through
any appeal to pragmatism or wisdom. I’m just a walking waste heap of arbitrary
habits accumulated and passed down over generations.”

“It sounds like you feel
your sense of self is unraveling.”

“The thing is, I can’t
imagine a Yąnomamö ever saying anything like that—that their sense of self is
being undermined, or anything about their sense of self at all for that matter—and
it’s making me doubt that concepts like that could ever truly mean anything.
Does that make any sense? It’s the first time I’m saying it out loud. It’s
something I knew about before: this flimsiness, this historical contingency at
the heart of all cultures, the fact that our cherished ideas and experiences
aren’t as universal as we think, aren’t as natural. But it’s really hitting me
now.”

“Lachlan, I can only
relate as far as remembering what it was like finding out how provincial my
life and my family’s thinking and traditions were after I went away to college,
after I started at U of M. I guess it left me a little queasy and disoriented
at times, but it was mostly thrilling. I’ll look back fondly on those days for
the rest of my life.” She gazes out through the window, her nostalgia
registering as another rebuke to him for not providing the makings of a more
satisfying or exhilarating present for her to inhabit, for instead striking
this hollow bargain with her, promising her adventure for the cost of hardship
and instead locking her away in a sort of cloister—albeit one with a gorgeous
view. Turning her eyes back onto him, she asks, “Isn’t there anyone you can
talk to, anyone who’s been through a similar experience?”

She’s desperate for someone
to talk to herself, he notes, but she thinks of me first.

“My professors back at U
of M will be eager to hear about my experiences, I imagine. I can’t say for
sure how many ethnographic fieldworkers are staying at IVIC right now, but I wouldn’t
have time to talk to them anyway. I go back tomorrow, and I’d much rather spend
my time with you and the kids”—the kids who one moment look at him like a total
stranger and the next seem to forget that he ever left them to fend for
themselves.

“Lachlan, when you said
you felt like everything is arbitrary, does that include you and me? Do you
mean marriage and family feel like arbitrary concepts too?”

I wish for right now, he
nearly says aloud, you could be a little less canny. “The Yąnomamö have wives
and families too,” he assures her instead. “Those practices actually are
universals as far as I know.” Universal themes, maybe, but with tremendous
variation. Yąnomamö men often have more than one wife, for instance. Do they
feel love, romantic love, the way we do? If so, he’s yet to see any indication.
Of course, that’s something a man would downplay, what with the lowly status of
women and the contempt for all things feminine.

Looking over and seeing that
his assurance has fallen flat, he says, “Honey, honestly, how much I love you
and Dominic and Kara is about the only reality for me that feels grounded at
all.” Though, even that reality, he refrains from adding, has been shaken up,
just a bit, lately. At the beach yesterday, he watched his children playing in
the surf and heard the chanting of shaboris trying to wrest children’s souls
back from the clutches of malevolent hekura. The first time he saw them after
arriving in Caracas, he noticed again they both have the same constellation of
faint freckles across their noses and under their eyes as their mom, and he had
a feeling like, these are real
kids—this is the natural way for children to be. But spending time with them has
eroded the wall dividing them from the other children he’s been surrounded by
of late.

So much of what we see in
children—especially our own—is projected there from our own minds, but the kids
themselves have a way of announcing their sovereignty; they have their own
overriding temperaments, their stubbornly, frustratingly paltry grasp of
cultural niceties and higher-order agendas. Kids are just kids. And if you’re
not raising them the natural way, the best way, because all you have to go by
are those same cultural niceties and abstract agendas, then you have to
question your true role. Are you passing on the culture for the benefit of your
children? Or have you been duped into passing it on for its own sake? Is
culture more like a parasite, one that infects your thoughts and distorts your
perceptions while trapping you in boxed spaces—or, in a starkly different
setting, trapping you in a tradition of fighting to prove you’re waiteri?

Lac looked at his
children, who’d grown quickly bored with sandcastles and were now arguing over
which of them should rightly bury the other in the sand, and he thought: How
can I teach you anything when everything I know is so—arbitrary, so
disconnected from any but the most tenuous ties to the natural order. Everything
I know is a belief that came about through some happenstance of history. He
considers telling Laura about this moment of doubt at the beach. But his
feelings of ineptitude as a parent leave plenty of room for guilt over missing
so much of his kids’ lives while he’s off in the jungle listening to all those
chants attending the deaths of other people’s children.

The villagers don’t need
an anthropologist; they need a doctor. And I need to be with my own kids.

He continues driving
silently while his thoughts churn, and he sees how much of a bind he’s in with
Laura: he can’t remain silent without making her feel cut off and excluded, but
he can’t tell her what he’s thinking because he doesn’t want to worry her. On
top of that, he sees that wherever he goes now he’s going to feel the pull of
the other place; he’s a cross-cultural being now, a hybrid, and he’ll never
again know the peace of being at the center of the universe, a true heir to the
truest and best, the pragmatically finest-tuned cultural traditions informed by
the firmest grasp on what’s natural and what’s moral and what’s authentic. He
won’t say any of this to Laura, not off the cuff, not till he’s wrapped his own
mind around it, started to come to terms. If he’s in a tailspin himself,
there’s no point dragging her into it. He’ll share when he’s got it all more
under control. In the meantime, he’s got axes to buy and small talk to make.

*****

Currency is the lifeblood
whose circulation unites the disparate cells of the larger superorganism of the
State. I hand you banknotes, you hand me tools. Even if I want to spend my
money across the border in the U.S., I only have to exchange my bolívares and céntimos for dollars and cents. A Catholic can buy from a
Protestant with the same money he uses to pay taxes to a secular
government—nominally secular anyway. Currency cuts across nationalities and
creeds, and its rudiments operate even among the most primitive peoples. I can
trade these axes and machetes, which I paid for with cash, to the Yąnomamö for
labor or information. They understand trade perfectly well, along with
reciprocity more generally.

Out of this inchoate
instinct for fair exchange emerges simple markets, and then complex economies.
Suddenly I’m less tempted to kill you for some miniscule boost in status;
instead I see you as a potential customer, partner, or employee. Maybe
henceforward we’ll have rules, built from the raw materials of our kinship
customs—themselves a mixture of instinctual bonds and conventional obligations—centered
on roles governing how I treat people of various categories, and voilà: we have
a society capable of cooperating on what was hitherto a superhuman scale. Even
if we’ve never personally participated in such grand enterprises as the
building of a miles-long suspension bridge or the carving of a canal connecting
two of the seven seas, we still support the program at a cellular level,
accepting the roles of employee, customer, or merchant, and thus powering the
organs of commerce, government, and infrastructural development.

But what role do I play
in this superorganism? What do I produce and sell?

Lac poses this question to
himself as he stands before the mirror in the bathroom of their IVIC quarters after
returning from his currency-armed foray to commandeer madohe. What do I build?
If I don’t elevate my status through violence, and I don’t run up any profits
through commerce, then where does my worth as a man come from? My wife unhappily
waits for me, tending to our children while I follow Indians around their
gnat-infested village, trying not to piss them off as I fill out charts and
plead with them to forget their proscription against saying names aloud to
strangers. She meanwhile seems to be spending us ever closer to penury. He
hasn’t told Laura about the figurative and literal meanings of hǫri. You
should, he tells himself; she’d be interested.

The bathroom is quiet and
he cherishes the privacy, even as he distrusts it—someone must be about to
burst in, or is already listening outside. He never feels comfortably alone
anymore, so he’s reluctant to return even to the company of his own family.

I am a man with no name
of my own, he murmurs to his reflection, just the one my father gave me. I have
no status anywhere, having achieved nothing of note by any society’s standards.
I can’t truly live here, whether here
is IVIC or Ann Arbor.

Lac has a small square
mirror in his hut outside Bisaasi-teri but he never uses it. Why would he? He
was letting his beard grow until he got to IVIC and Laura requested he shave, and
he doesn’t need to see his teeth to brush them. A toothbrush, he thinks: that’s
what I forgot to get. In lieu of thorough brushings with toothpaste and
multiple rinsings, Lac usually makes some swipes with a dry brush. It’s taking
a toll on the bristles. Running his tongue over his tobacco-stained but healthy
teeth, he leans over the sink to get a better look at himself. A
twenty-six-year-old man with no name, borrowing his grandfather’s name for the
time being. Five foot seven with alert, intentional eyes—rimmed with a
familiar, comforting hint of mischief. Stepping away from the mirror, he sizes
up his body; he may be a good fifteen pounds lighter than he was in November,
and losing the weight so fast has left him looking drawn, his cheeks dry and
inward draping, his flesh like the rind of a piece of fruit left on the counter
for weeks.

“Jesus, I look ten years
older.”

He was skinny before; now
he’s boney and drooping, but he’s still—what? He still possesses something not
apparent in his reflection: a springiness to his joints, a wiriness to his
muscles. The last vestiges of the boy he’s grown up being have oozed out
through his pores in the jungle heat, or got sucked out of him by gnats, or
humiliated to death by the Yąnomamö. What’s left is at once sagging and
emaciated, wizened and supple, toughened and enervated. He’ll need to build
everything back up from this rubble, atop this pulverized foundation. But he
possesses the vim and spirit and eagerness to get started. There just may be
enough grit and stubborn drive left in him to make it happen.

There just may be enough
mischief left in the corners of his eyes.

If Laura has trouble
recognizing me, he thinks, she’ll just have to get to know me again—or we’ll
have to get to know each other rather. Because the truth is I do have a name,
one I’ve earned for myself. My name is Shaki. It’s not a big name, not one that
comes with any warning of how waiteri I am. But I may be able to parlay whatever
it does convey into a means for transforming all the other men of the village
into named beings as well. When I’m finished with that, I’ll swap it out for my
old name, my grandfather’s name, which will have new weight and new meaning.

He’s anxious to get back
to work.

******

The latch on the door to his hut is dangling from screws
loosely gripped by splintered wood. Someone has pried it apart from the frame,
or just kicked in the door. Ordinarily he’d fume at the invasion, the
disrespect for his property, the violation of his space, the thought of the
bastards rifling his belongings. But he expected this. So he merely smiles and
mutters, “I hope you found something you like, you little shits.” Sure enough,
everything inside bears the signature of a frenzied search. Lac is gratified to
find the lock on the inner door remains secure; it doesn’t even look like they
tried breaking it. He made sure this second door and the separating wall were
reinforced, and he half-heartedly concealed the latch by draping a towel over
it. The men who helped him build the divider know about the extra space of
course, but to thieves making a quick survey it wouldn’t advertise itself, and
even if they discovered it, opening it would likely present a bigger challenge
than they were prepared for. Still, it’s only a matter of time before a
determined thief discovers and breaks through this barrier as well, so Lac
determines to keep his valuables as secret as he can for as long as he can.

Is it fair though, he wonders, to call them
thieves? Whenever he catches one of them with a stolen item, the culprit
insists he’s only borrowing it, or that he plans to give Lac something in
return later. And Shaki, the defendant further insists, is being stingy by
demanding the item be returned anyway, stinginess being one of the cardinal
sins among the Yąnomamö. Everyone in Bisaasi-teri knows everyone else, has
known everyone else as long as they can remember, so there is some plausibility
to the case for a different understanding of possession and the transfer thereof.
It’s also quite plausible they’re just thieves playing their ignorant nabä
visitor for a fool.

Maybe I could hire Rowahirawa to guard the place
while I’m away, he thinks, but that guy is never where you’re counting on him to
be, and it’s all too easy to imagine him smiling innocently as one thing after
another goes mysteriously missing, and still smiling as he demands the
agreed-upon payment. “And be quick about it or I’ll smash your head.”

Lac catches himself smiling at Rowahirawa’s antics,
a frequent occurrence of late. He realizes he’s excited to see his chief
informant and get the latest gossip. In his letter to Ken, Lac referred to
Rowahirawa as his friend; then again, he also referred to him as Pedro, since
he’s not yet sure Rowahirawa is his actual name—he’s only heard it said a couple
times and never dares utter it himself. He’s also not sure how he’ll spell it
when the time comes. But is this man—Pedro or Rowahirawa or whatever his name
ends up being—his friend?

Clearing a space for the many bags he’s schlepped
from his dugout, he thinks of how Rowahirawa showed up after the chest-pounding
tournament to make sure he was in a safe place, or not in a horrendously unsafe
place anyway. But, as he described to Ken, Rowahirawa had once “almost” gotten
angry with him for trying to stop him, Rowahirawa, from chopping up poles Lac
had just paid him to help collect—paid him with the machete he was now using to
chop them up. “Almost”: Lac hadn’t realized the Yąnomamö were using the English
word until he’d written about Rowahirawa’s anger to Ken, such is the linguistic
muddle in his head.

Lac looks at his thumb, swollen to three times its
proper size, and recalls another incident when his maybe friend almost got
angry. They were carrying a heavy log when Rowahirawa stubbed his toe on the
edge of the pile. Enraged—understandably so—he threw his side down, sending Lac
lurching off balance, smashing his thumb between the log he was still trying to
hold and the one on top of the pile it landed on. Murderously angry one moment
but acting as if nothing had happened the next: it was the same as what
happened after the chest-pounding tournament, just on a smaller scale. Flare
up, then poof, onto the next thing. Lac’s thumbnail is still broken and the
swollen joint aches when he flexes it.

Villagers are already showing up outside the hut.
He has to hurry and secure anything that can be easily concealed and walked off
with. Then he’ll negotiate to have some of them help him unload the heavier
stuff from his dugout. They’re agreeable enough, he thinks, and easier to live
with when you know what to expect—which is never—or rather when you know the
range of what you might expect anyway. That curtain he spoke of to Laura, the
one he has to drop to guard his sanity, his “sense of self,” isn’t the only one
he’s contending with. The Yąnomamö have obscuring tactics of their own.

He thinks of the blandly friendly but casually
impersonal, or the surly but impersonal, attitude of people in the city,
contrasting it with his wife’s intense engagement and nuanced expressions of
sympathy. To be seen and treated as a sentient and feeling creature, one whose
thoughts and general state of mind matter for something—it was almost
overwhelming. He wanted nothing more than to hide in the IVIC quarters, soaking
in the pure silence until it percolated to his every cell.

He couldn’t share with Laura much of what
preoccupied him for his two-week-long visit. “The Mahekodo-teri did plan to leave before
instigating an all-out shooting battle,” Rowahirawa agreed when they discussed
the tournament’s aftermath the day after the visitors departed. “But that last
thrust they made was a provocation, one the Bisaasi-teri let stand. That was
the face-saving move which allowed them to leave without a bunch of killing. It
shifted the shame onto the Bisaasi-teri. The men here, in failing to retaliate,
accepted that the Mahekodo-teri were the stronger force.”

“So they were humiliated, but tolerated it for the
sake of peace?” That wasn’t the impression Lac had taken away, but he was in no
fit state of mind to rely on his own assessments. Still, in the days following,
the Bisaasi-teri never seemed crestfallen, which may be because their
humiliation is like their anger: flare up, fade away, onto the next thing. Lac
wonders though if their pique at having been intimidated accounts for some of
the bravado on display as they spoke of their friends’ troubles with Patanowä-teri
in the days before he left for Caracas.

He steps outside and sees that several men with
unfamiliar faces are walking over from the shabono with the Bisaasi-teri men he
recognizes. “The Monou-teri are moving back to Bisaasi-teri,” one of the
younger men says when he sees Lac’s confused expression. “Towahowä has
been killed.”

“Ah, I see, younger brother,” he responds. “So
there’s to be more fighting with Patanowä-teri.”

After unloading his supplies and repairing the
broken latch on the door of his hut, he ambles over to the shabono and sees a
vast construction project underway. “Shaki,” he hears Rowahirawa’s voice
calling before turning to see him approaching. Lac's heart gives a lurch, and he can’t tell if he’s
overjoyed at seeing his friend or frightened by the wild Indian running up to
him. “Why were you away so long? You’ve missed a lot of action for your white
leaves.”

Lac smiles as Rowahirawa pushes and pats him like
a kid brother—even though Lac is much taller and older. Not only are the
Monou-teri moving in, with their sixty or so members, but the second Upper
Bisaasi-teri shabono is being dismantled so the entire group can be
consolidated within one structure. He looks around and sees only a few men from
Lower Bisaasi-teri, so he figures they’ll probably be staying in their homes on
the far side of the Mavaca.

It doesn’t take Lac long to observe that the men
here are disdainful toward the visitors. Even Bahikoawa wears his disgust at
the Monou-teri openly: they failed to avenge their headman’s death, his cousin,
whom he called brother. The ambush occurred only a couple weeks after Towahowä
had led his own raid on Patanowä-teri. The men there knew the smaller village
was hoping to gain some notoriety, and they couldn’t afford to let the attack
go and risk encouraging more. Patanowä-teri suffers from a sort of
fastest-draw-in-the-west syndrome. Everyone knows theirs is the largest, most
formidable village in the territory, so everyone knows attacking them is the
ticket to greater renown. Most raiding villages assume that, as big as Patanowä-teri
is, they won’t be able to retaliate against every last group who attacks them.
But this time the Monou-teri miscalculated; the Patanowä-teri decided on a
quick counterattack, going so far as to track the Monou-teri to where they’d
recently relocated and planted a new garden, and specifically targeting the
hotheaded headman who’d led the raid against them, the man responsible for the
death of their covillager and kinsman, the poor bastard who got porcupined
while stuck up in a tree harvesting rasha.

Lac wanders about, greeting people with smiles and
getting smiles and mild harassment in return. He turns the conversations to the
latest news at every opportunity. The Patanowä-teri crossed the river that was
supposed to impede their pursuit and found Towahowä with his wives. The rapid response team was
disciplined enough to leave the women behind after shooting him full of arrows,
listening to him spout his defiance with his dying breath. Lac gets this from
the wives themselves, and he searches their eyes for signs of the emotional
trauma he knows they must have sustained. They whine and shed tears aplenty,
but Lac can’t help wondering if Towahowä was rough with them, a man like that, so blustery and desperate for
recognition and authority. He was Bahikoawa’s cousin, headman of a village allied
to Bisaasi-teri, hence the headman of this village’s insistence on a
counterraid—or counter-counterraid rather. It makes some sense, but so many
people have relatives on both sides of the conflict.

After speaking with the women, at a loss how to
console them, he steps away and has Rowahirawa explain how the Bisaasi-teri are
reconstructing the shabono to accommodate the larger numbers, and how they’ll
also be fortifying the place against attack. He describes what sounds like a
palisade, a row of pikes surrounding the lean-to structure, which they’ll cover
with dried brush so the dogs will hear the rustling if anyone tries to sneak
over. In the cities, barking dogs are a nuisance, but here they’re serving
their original purpose. Lac’s eyes wander the area, searching for the underfed
but eager little servants. They circle the children, but no one could be said
to be playing with them. They merge with the background, helping with hunts on
occasion, and sounding the alarm if need be, but not on such friendly terms
with their masters as they would be in most parts of the States.

“He was searching for honey,” Rowahirawa says,
abruptly shifting topic. They’re standing side-by-side, watching the complex
structure being raised one manageable piece at a time. Thatching the roof must
be the most difficult part to get right, Lac thinks. “Two of his wives were
there with him,” Rowahirawa continues, “holding his children’s wrists or
carrying them on their backs. He stopped because he heard buzzing, looked up to
find the hive—and that’s when the Patanowä-teri fire their arrows at him. The
wives say they hit him all at once. He was standing there looking up into the
branches, and then he was looking down to see a bunch of arrows sticking out of
his torso. He would have died from that eventually. But he was still able to
nock, draw, and fire an arrow back at the raiders. Who knows if he hit any of
them? Then one of them fired a last arrow at him, its bamboo tip piercing the
flesh beneath his ear and poking out through the other side of his neck. He
staggered and swayed, trying not to die, and fell forward, his face landing in
the dirt. He bled to death as his wives grabbed the kids and ran back to the
shabono, and the raiders, not bothering to kidnap the women, ran to cross back
to the other side of the river, fearing immediate retaliation. But Towahowä was
the only waiteri in the village—I’ve told you this before. After hearing about
what happened, the rest of the village fled and hid in the forest, thinking the
Patanowä-teri would attack again. They fled and hid like a bunch of women.

“This is what the Bisaasi-teri pata can’t abide,
this shameful cowardice and refusal to avenge his brother. The Monou-teri have
been on the move ever since. You’ve seen them here. They stay with the Lower
Bisaasi-teri too, eat all their food too, then they go visit our Shamatari
allies to the south, the Mömariböwei-teri and the Reyaboböwei-teri. Then they
go back to where they’re planting their new garden in a place the Patanowä-teri
won’t know to look for them. But the Monou-teri are hopeless without waiteri.
The Patanowä-teri are at war with many enemies now, but Monou-teri is weak.
Attacking them, chasing them away for good, taking all their women—that would
be an easy way to send a message to all their other enemies. Bahikoawa is
saving their lives by insisting on this raid. He’s giving them a chance anyway,
as sick as he is. Some of the Monou-teri will need to step up. Towahowä’s
brother should be meat hungry.”

Rowahirawa has taken special interest in
Towahowä’s story, a man always eager to fight, a man whose tendency to seduce
or steal other men’s wives led to the fissioning of Monou-teri from
Bisaasi-teri. One waiteri holding an entire small village together—but he pushed
it too far. What lesson will Rowahirawa draw from it?

More importantly, Lac wonders, how can I exploit
the upheaval to get some more names on my charts?

He’s formulated a plan to pull people aside,
promising them some small payment—fishhooks or one of the red loincloths he’s
bought—and he’ll whisper the questions in the informant’s ear, encouraging him
or her to whisper the answers back into his. That’s the obvious part, but
here’s where it gets ingenious: he’s going to follow the gradients of
relatedness as they track from yahi to yahi around the shabono, asking each
family about the ones nearest. That will bring two advantages: he won’t have to
ask the informant for his own name or the names of close family members, and he
can use their reactions as a gauge of their neighbors’ honesty as he crosschecks
their answers with one another. What he’s counting on is that the Yąnomamö will
be slightly miffed when he whispers their names to them—and Yąnomamö don’t
exactly have good poker faces—helping to corroborate the identification. He’ll
have to be delicate about it; some of the men are bound to get angry,
especially when he asks about their deceased ancestors.

So he’s counting on them getting visibly angry but
not violently so. He chuckles at the precariousness of the balance he’s hoping
to strike. Yeah, totally ingenious. If you end up getting nowhere, you may at
least still end up getting killed.

Wandering around the shabono, Lac sees Bahikoawa.
It’s late in the afternoon. He’d normally be taking ebene and chanting with the
other men but the construction project takes precedence today. Lac can tell
from the way he’s moving that his affliction has returned and is causing him
pain in his abdomen or lower back—or both. How will he fare in the upcoming
battles and raids? Bahikoawa is the one really pushing for the raid against
Patanowä-teri, which is difficult for Lac to square with his observations of
the headman’s peacekeeping efforts. Really, it sounds like he’s appalled by
Towahowä’s brother’s cowardice—as if it amounted to a black mark on the lineage
they both represent. But he’s also exasperated with Monou-teri’s begging, not
just here and in Lower Bisaasi-teri, but among the Shamatari as well; they
start complaining about how much the moochers eat almost as soon as the Bisaasi-teri
are done throwing them a feast to force them to leave.

Will Bahikoawa’s status be elevated by the raid if
it’s successful? Or is he merely hoping to help Towahowä’s brother and the rest
of the Monou-teri achieve a sustainable independence? Lac will have to watch
and see how it plays out.

“The plan is to build and fortify the new
shabono,” Rowahirawa says, “and then eat the ashes and conduct the raid just as
the dry season comes to an end and the rains begin. If the rains flood the
trails, the Patanowä-teri won’t be able to pursue us.”

Lac has broken a self-imposed rule against asking
more than one question before giving his interlocuter sufficient time to
respond. One question, a pause to listen, one statement, then another
question—that’s the formula he’s decided on. The Yąnomamö love to hold court
and tell stories about how clever they are, how they prevailed over a less
clever person in a series of encounters, or about how fierce they are, or how
generous—they’re like people anywhere in this regard—and they even like to talk
about their lineage’s history. You just have to treat the topic gingerly, and
remember that the Yąnomamö, for all their wild hauteur, can be very skittish, or
very easy to scare away in any case, though, if he thinks about it, that’s more
from annoyance and not at all from fear.

In his most fantastic dreams, he either has a
chance to speak with that English-accented Indian who can help him answer all
his linguistic questions, or he’s lighted on the key to cracking the Yąnomamö cultural
code, learned precisely how to speak and behave to conduce to the divulgence of
their secrets—or the unremarkable minutiae of their days—in easily notable
nuggets.

“Shaki, you moron. Of course I’m going. I’m
waiteri.”

“And the ashes?” he can’t help prying.

Rowahirawa for once doesn’t seem to mind. He’s
catching on bit by bit what it means to hail from a place where customs and
beliefs and languages are far different. Lac has ceased being merely a defective
human, improperly reared, with substandard intelligence and poor hearing. The
transformation began some time ago when the two men shared the triumph of a
perforated linguistic barrier. Lac had been running his finger along text
written in English, emphasizing the gaps between the words, and then pointing
to his Yąnomamö transcriptions with their unbroken chain of letters. As he
encouraged Rowahirawa to slow down in repeating the phrase they were working
on, the young warrior’s face went abruptly blank. He looked like a caricature
of the guy with the lightbulb going on over his head. Rowahirawa had of course
used words all his life, but he’d never pondered the concept of a word. This
pale nabä he calls Shaki, it dawned on him, wants to know where one word starts
and the other begins. They howled together with joy, slapping each other on the
shoulder. Such a simple thing turns out to be far more complicated than you’ve
ever allowed for in the past; you’ll never think of it the same again.

“Towahowä was cremated by the Monou-teri after he
was shot to death by the Patanowä-teri. His ashes were gathered up and saved in
a calabash—an empty gourd—so they can be eaten during the ceremony that will be
held before the raid to avenge him. The women will mix the ashes in with date
and drink it down.”

Just the women? Lac manages to refrain from
asking.

Rowahirawa gives such a thoughtful answer that Lac
suspects he may be starting to realize his foreign friend Shaki may even be an
interesting character in his own right, perhaps with something to teach,
something to contribute aside from his poorly guarded madohe.

“They won’t use all the ashes,” he continues.
“Some they save, storing them above the joists in their yahi. If this raid is
unsatisfying, they’ll have another feast, the women will eat more of the ashes,
and then the men will go raiding again.”

Another form of currency, Lac thinks: a stored-up
rationale for murdering neighboring villagers, thus establishing your waiteri
credentials. Maybe the women are the ones who eat the ashes because they’re the
ones who need the reminder of why the raid is supposedly necessary. Men are
never free to forget the necessity of violence.

In his anthropology courses back at U of M, Lac learned
that all hunter-gatherer bands are egalitarian—at least when it comes to the
men. At most, a man will stand as primus
inter pares, a first among equals, to deal with temporary exigencies, as
when someone needs to serve as trade representative or lead everyone through a
time of threat or drought or famine. It was treated as established fact that
the importance of individual status only came about as differential access to strategic
resources took hold, be it food or water or land, or possessions like building
materials or drugs or steel tools. Or currency. So Lac came to Boca Mavaca
expecting to find a tribe of egalitarians, the headman playing, if anything, a
slightly more pronounced version of the primus
inter pares role.

At some point in the development toward larger,
more complex social organization, hierarchies invariably form, but since
tribespeople like the Yąnomamö have so few possessions, and nothing by way of
accumulated or transferable wealth, they ought to more closely resemble hunter-gatherers,
with leveling mechanisms playing a prominent role in customary etiquette. When
a !Kung hunter bags a huge gazelle, he has some other band member carve and
divvy up the meat, all the while getting teased about the paltry size of the
haul he’s brought home. He’ll as likely as not respond with his own
self-effacing humor, because self-aggrandizement and superior airs will win you
nothing but widespread ostracism and scorn. This is one element of that noble
savage idea, the perfect possessionless peoples with nary a concern for their
individual ranking. Without the corrupting influence of wealth and inequality, individuals
act for the benefit of the larger group—and this is one of the principles
underlying the view that societies function as superorganisms, and that
cultural evolution operates at the level of the entire society.

But the prediction emerging from this theory—that
a group with few possessions will have little concern for individual status—has
failed spectacularly in this case. The Yąnomamö, while not rigidly
hierarchical, are if anything more obsessed with their status than the average
person you meet in the States. Around the time prepubescent boys start trying,
unsuccessfully at first, to tie their foreskins to their waist strings, which
Lac guesses occurs around age twelve, they also start complaining about other
village members saying their names in public. True, there’s a spiritual aspect
to the name taboo as well; Lac has learned that while it’s usually safe to
utter the name of a child, doing so when that child is sick will get you chased
away by outraged relatives. Names fall in with the general category of symbols
for intimacy, trust, and liberty-taking—or liberty-allowing.

No one wants me to use his name, for instance,
because I’m a nabä, and they’re afraid I’ll use their name to cast an evil
spell against them.

All this sickness amid the thoroughgoing ignorance
of germs and infections—they can’t be too careful, but at the same time men are
far more vigilant when it comes to improper name usage. Lac has yet to see a
young girl approaching menarche who throws a fit about someone addressing her
by name. And he knows that when relying on teknonomy for circumlocutions—as the
Yąnomamö do themselves—it’s safer to name a female child if you have the
option. It’s as if layered on top of their concerns about spiritual attack is
an entirely separate game of whose name is most important—and it all comes down
to who’s better able to enforce the proscription against using his own and
those of his kin, especially his recently deceased kin, as it falls on you to
hold your father’s or your uncle’s name sacrosanct after he’s gone.

Can the hekura attack one’s ancestor’s bohii in
hedu? That never seems to be a concern. The concern is rather that hearing your
relative’s name reminds you of that person’s absence, and people are to know
they can’t treat a man’s emotions in so trifling a manner—because this man is
very important, very waiteri.

Lac has several times run into trouble with the
men he interviews even after he’s explained to them what he’s planning to do.
“I want to get the names of some of your family members,” he’ll say. The man
will agree to provide the information in exchange for some specified item from
Lac’s store of madohe, and then Lac will proceed with the questions, doing his
level best to show deference by asking for the names in a whisper, cupping his
mouth with his hand to the man’s ear. Yet when Lac gets the name and whispers
it back for confirmation—or often after he merely asks for the name of, say, a
grandfather—the man goes berserk, and Lac ends up fleeing to his hut. Lucky for
him, the flare-ups are short-lived. This scenario has played out twice even
when Lac tried withholding payment until after the interview was complete.

“I told
you what I was going to do, what I was going to ask, and you agreed god damn it! How the hell can you get mad?” He keeps
saying this, holding his head in his hands, while pacing his kitchen slash
office after being chased to his hut.

When he was just weeks into his fieldwork, the
Yąnomamö saw that he was beginning to pick up bits and pieces of their
language. On occasion, a man would approach him and give him a message to relay
to another man he pointed out. Lac, eager to be helpful, would deliver the
message as close to verbatim as he could manage—unaware he was saying the man’s name aloud while insulting him with
bitter succinctness. Then the recipient would blow
a gasket and chase him with an upraised club or a machete, while the first man
laughed uproariously. “But you just saw the other guy tell me what to say,” he
once complained, stupidly, in English. “How can you be mad at me for telling
you exactly what he said?”

Now Lac is beginning to understand. The point
isn’t to dole out just deserts. In that case, they may take circumstances and
intentions into account, as we would in the West. The point is to put on a
display of sudden temper, advertise how easily angered you are. You weren’t
being threatened or punished in way meant to correct your behavior, he tells himself.
You were being used as a prop in a demonstration of fierceness.

*****

For the rest of his first day back at Bisaasi-teri,
Lac trades off between wandering around, helping the men with the building of
their new lean-tos, mostly from parts of the old shabono, and sitting back to
observe and take notes. He watches some women making thatch for the roof and
thinks it funny that their role in lifting and tying together the supports and
rafters is kept to a minimum because everyone knows how clumsy women are.
They’re seldom allowed to use clay cooking pots for fear they’ll break them.
But the way they chop and gather firewood demands a level of dexterity and
strength and athleticism beyond anything he sees the men display. Even the
men’s hunts are mostly walking and creeping through the forest, with a quick
occasional sprint.

Early in the evening, Lac begins to have the pleasant
sense once more that he’s doing good work, being a good fieldworker, contributing
substantively to his discipline. He enjoys it. Aside from at IVIC with his
family, he can’t think of anywhere he’d rather be. The Yąnomamö seem to have
finally habituated to his presence; they no longer make it a point whenever he
passes to jeer and demand machetes or pots, tossing in a threat or two to speed
up the transfer. He’s becoming a fixture, though the children still flock
around him wherever he goes. He entertains them in exchange for the freedom to
ask of them the stupid questions he’s hesitant to ask their parents. Then he
lies awake at night worrying about them catching upper respiratory infections.
Most of his fishhooks and nylon line ends up going to them. Right now, though,
he’s squatting next to a fire in the new plaza that’s taking shape, idly
slapping mosquitoes, enjoying being left alone.

He pretends to jot down some notes, but he’s
daydreaming. It’s getting dark and he’s thinking back to something Laura said
while they were enjoying a rare block of quiet, sitting together on the balcony
and taking in the vista of forested mountaintops: “The sunsets here are
different. In Michigan, the sky turns orange and scarlet and puts on a display
that lasts a long time. I guess it’s because we’re so close to the equator and
the sun strikes the earth so directly; it takes a shorter route through the
atmosphere, so the colors that come from the prisming beams aren’t as
impressive and don’t last as long. It’s daylight one minute, and then you look
up and it’s nightfall, and then it’s just dark.”

Lac hadn’t noticed it, not enough to remark on it
anyway, but he knew immediately she was right. What else might she notice and
remark upon that’s right under my nose, he thinks, or right over my head, in
this place? Laughing quietly, he wonders if he should have been more stern with
her about her spending, or if he should worry about her drinking. Instead, he
stood there and let her chide him: “You need to let me know where our finances
stand if you want me to budget more prudently.” So, in essence, his response to
the discovery of her burning through his NIMH grant was to give her more
responsibility over their funds. Yet he feels much better now, knowing he’s set
her such a challenge, almost certain she’ll rise to it. That’s how Laura
operates.

I also promised I’d get her and the kids into
Bisaasi-teri as soon as I can, he thinks. But how can I do that when the
villagers are building a palisade against attacks from the larger village
they’re about to pick a fight with? How can I do that when my plan is to travel
to villages farther inland, villages more removed from the influence of all the
damned missionaries?

Will people there use the word “almost” like the
ones here do?

He thinks of the giant Shamatari village way up
the Mavaca Rowahirawa keeps talking about. He’ll have to travel there sometime
before his seventeen months are up. Maybe Chuck will be back at some point soon
and Lac will be able to count on him to keep everyone safe while he travels.
Maybe Laura will take to the ethnography business and they’ll be like Margaret
Mead and Gregory Bateson—though, didn’t Bateson divorce Mead after some years?
He gazes off into the rapidly dimming treetops beyond the upper edge of the
shabono’s thatched roofing. “Mist-shrouded” is how the adventure stories would
describe the forest as he views it now, but the white doesn’t form a shroud so
much as a bunch of cottony strands, a ghostly substitute for the snow these
leaves will never touch.

Before long, it’s dark, and he’s staring at the
firelit notebook in his hands. A man is chanting, or orating really, about his
plans for tomorrow, and about his grievances. The Yąnomamö do this all the
time, making announcements like this as everyone is rubbing the bottoms of
their feet together to dust them off before rolling into their hammocks. Lac
stands up. He needs to get to his hut, but he’s fearful of what awaits him in the
darkening space between here and there. Luckily, he’s too tired for the fear to
consume him, or even to deter him.

He has the thought, as he has several times
before, that the children who usually surround him a good portion of the day
know most of the names he’s after. He’s offhandedly asked for one now and again
to see what they’ll do. They refuse, sometimes playing at being violently angry,
reminding him of his early days in the field when he was appalled to see
mothers goading their sons to return tit for tat in teary-eyed disputes. But Lac
senses that if he were to go deviously about his efforts, he’d achieve far
easier success with villagers under twelve.

He won’t do it. As tempting as the idea is, he
knows he wouldn’t feel the least bit proud later, knowing that he’d had to
finagle his data out of small kids.

He wanders out of the shabono. The darkened
clearing abounds with terrors just out of view. But he makes his way over the
rise, one groggy but cautious step at a time. Rowahirawa sometimes hangs his
hammock in Lac’s hut, but he’s nowhere to be seen now.

*****

Late morning: Lac is systematically testing and
rejecting different times of day to attempt his genealogical work. Now it’s
when the men are returning from their gardening but have yet to take ebene,
meaning they should be much less volatile. His time in Caracas has ruined his
eating schedule, restoring his appetite to its Western cyclicality. His stomach
twists and grates, no longer conditioned to the paltry breakfast of crackers
and peanut butter and café con leche that needs to sate him until evening.

He’s also on edge because he woke up this morning
in an achingly intense state of arousal. Upon arriving at his IVIC quarters, he
was eager to avail himself of the luxury of cascading hot water, and he took
the opportunity to release some of his pent-up tension, lest he end up failing
in his husbandly duties when he and Laura found themselves alone together.
After later accomplishing the deed in a modestly satisfactory manner, though,
he still worried that his contribution was lackluster, worried so much in fact
that since returning to the field he’s been kicking himself for not properly
savoring the few times they had together, for not even coming close to
achieving any level of gratification that would tide him over until the next
visit.

He groans. Imagine how she feels. Or better yet,
don’t. You have work to do.

He’s abandoned the idea of interviewing people
separately in the open; if it’s in the open, he’s realized, it won’t be
separate. Plus public interviews heighten the temptation for the men to show
off their quickness to anger, a risk he’d like to minimize. Instead, he’ll
interview them in his hut, making a show of his whispering deference. The key
will lie in the crosschecking. He’s already caught them in what he suspects are
fabrications on a few occasions. He won’t ask about the most recent among the
dead, if he can help it, and he won’t ask informants about their own nearest
kin. He’ll ask people from different but related lineages for information about
each other, checking for accuracy with actual members later, even if checking
amounts to little more than seeing if the latter informant gets angry about
what the earlier one has divulged. And he’ll start with the older village
members, since they seem calmer. Plus they’re bound to know more of the history
he’s after.

A lot of this he’s tried before. He’s still
expecting to be chased out of his hut once or twice, given a few false names
it’ll be a pain in the ass for him to track down and correct, and robbed any
chance he gives them. But this will be the first time he puts all the tactics
together into a systematic strategy. He knows the outlines of the culture and
the language; it’s time to start digging into the deeper organizational
structures, time to see how the kinship system really works, time to start
getting the data he promised Dr. Nelson so he can incorporate it into his
genetics research.

Lac looks down at his charts. He’s got circles and
squares—for women and men respectively—filled in willy-nilly; he doesn’t even
know if the names and relationships as diagrammed are accurate. One of the
goals of these early sessions will be to identify the most knowledgeable and most
reliable informants. He’s essentially holding tryouts. He’s even got a plan for
a graduated pay scale for those who keep making it to the next round. Will it
work? He laughs. Probably not—at least not as I’m envisioning it now.

He’ll have to make adjustments to the system as he
progresses and learns. He keeps telling himself that no matter how compelling
what’s going on with Monou-teri and Patanowä-teri may be, he didn’t come here
to study warfare. His main research focus requires that he first have
comprehensive genealogies. Those should help him understand more about
intervillage hostilities anyway. All of it will go into helping him understand
how primitive societies evolve into more complex ones, how basic kinship rules
get stretched to accommodate larger settlement sizes, how leadership roles
emerge. He’ll learn about what drives village fissionings—and village fusionings,
like the one taking place now.

But I already know what’s bringing these villages together,
he thinks. The role of war is central. And is it societies that evolve, the way
the early sociologists like Durkheim and the functionalist anthropologists like
Radcliffe-Brown envisioned—along with Drs. White and Service? Or is it
individual decent lines that evolve? This latter hypothesis seems far likelier
based on what he learned from his genetics classes at U of M, which were taught
by some of Dr. Nelson’s undergraduate aids. But biological evolution based in
genes is distinct from cultural evolution based on—well, that’s one of the
things he’s here to figure out.

Ah, Lachlan, one question at a time. And first
things first.

He opens the door to his hut and heads to the
shabono with its growing palisade to recruit his first informant of the day.

*****

“Tell no one I told you these things.”

Lac hears this admonishment for the third time
since this morning. On the boat ride up the Orinoco on his first day in the
field, he’d worried about how his professors had all boasted with strained irony of being
“adopted” into their research subjects’ society. Missionaries talk about being
adopted in the same way. What would it mean if the Waica—whom he would come to
know as the Yąnomamö—were to withhold such favor from him? Merely imagining it
was devastating.

He needn’t have worried. What all the travelers
and missionaries fail to understand—and his professors should have done a better
job explaining—is that primitive peoples only know how to interact with a
person according to kinship rules. There’s no category, as there must be in
civilizations, for the random guy passing on the street, or the scientific researcher
conducting a study, the outsider unrelated to anyone. So they confer on you
what you mistake for honorary kinship status. The Yąnomamö started calling him
shori—brother-in-law—from day one, if he can recall. They needed to do this to
end their bewilderment about what rules should govern their dealings with him.

The practice says nothing about their personal
feelings toward you, though you may perchance be relieved they’re addressing
you at all and not unceremoniously impaling you with the six-foot arrows they
have trained on your face. They would call someone shori even if they hated his
guts and only tolerated his presence because of the madohe he promised them.
Being called shori or any other kinship term doesn’t mean a damn thing.

But nothing signals acceptance—even liking—like
the sharing of secrets. Every time one of Lac’s informants tells him not to
tell anyone that he’s shared all these names and details of family histories
with him, Lac flashes a grin, one he does his best to hide. He’s been in the
field for over three months, and this is the first sign he’s received that the
people of Bisaasi-teri may be willing to let their guard down with him. He
hasn’t been aspiring to honorary group membership, but this small gesture of
trust, their enveloping him within their minor conspiracies, feels to him like
an ultimate verdict on the substance of his character. If acceptance can be
extended across so wide a chasm, he must possess some trait whose appeal
transcends language and history and culture. He must just be a solid guy, a
good person, a worthy and respectable man. And likeable too.

It feels better than he would have anticipated, if
he’d anticipated feeling it. He gives the man sitting on the chair in his
office slash kitchen—the Yąnomamö appreciate a sturdy chair as much as anyone—a
bundle of fishhooks and a spool of fishing line before walking him to the door.
It’s early evening and he’s only conducted three interviews today. Once you get
them to sit down and start answering questions, you can’t get them to shut up
and leave. No matter. They’re giving him exactly the information he needs. He
thinks he may look back on this day in the distant future and see it as the day
he truly became an ethnographic fieldworker, an anthropologist—the day he
became a scientist.

With the advent of this process for collecting
names, his true work begins, not just his work, his whole life. With the
information he’s gathering, he’ll be able to crack the code of Yąnomamö
settlement patterns, social organization, and intervillage conflict—with
implications stretching back to a time before the earliest civilizations. A
fantasy takes up residence in his mind: a year or so from now he’ll be known as
the go-to guy for handling impossible field conditions, an indispensable aid to
his anthropological colleagues. Need information on a group too warlike for a
graduate student to study safely? Call Shackley. Need genealogical information
on another group with a taboo against sharing names? Send in the guy who wrote
the definitive (and virtuoso) ethnographic study of the Yąnomamö, the guy who
demonstrated that violence in tribal societies is rampant, upending decades of
previous theorizing about its causes.

And it all starts with the phrase, “Tell no one I
told you these things.”

Lac gently, then not-so-gently shoves his still
rambling informant out the door and sees more people gathered outside. They’ll
debrief the guy, he thinks, which could pose a problem: he’ll have to come up
with a lie or two to give them when they ask what we talked about. Lac has to
piss. He often pisses right outside the door—though he’s considering repairing
Clemens’s old outhouse—but not when there’s such a large audience. If he steps
outside, he’ll be surrounded by people begging to be his next informant, or
just begging. Not for the first time, he wishes he had a secret side door for
sneaking out unnoticed.

For now, he has little choice but to jostle his
way out among the crowd. “Ma, I’m done with my ohodemou for today,” he says,
repeating himself twice and thrice before managing to thread through the people
and make it to the edge of the clearing. He scans the ground before planting
his foot for each step into the forest, and then, swatting away the bareto,
opens his pants and lets loose the stream, doing an awkward amoebaesque shimmy
all the while to avoid suffering more bites than necessary. All the old hardships
bring an almost pleasant glow to the edges of his consciousness, now that he
can see through to accomplishing his goals.

One detail troubles him. The first informant’s
answers were wildly different from many of the second’s and the third’s. But
those last two’s answers were in near complete agreement. His plan includes a
contingency for this, so he simply determined the first guy, an older man,
cousin to the headman, was unreliable, perhaps out of overprotectiveness toward
their customs. But how can he be sure? How can he be sure of any of it?

For the moment, he acknowledges he can’t, but as
he continues his work, interviewing more informants and crosschecking their
accuracy, any discrepancies will be brought to light. He wanders over to the
shabono, which is taking shape nicely. He wonders how long it takes them to
build one from scratch. The palisade consists of logs, maybe eight feet long,
lashed together with vines and buried in postholes about a foot deep. It almost
looks like they’re making crude rafts. Building this barrier comprises the bulk
of the work the three groups have undertaken.

Remembering Laura’s observation that evening turns
to night more precipitously in the tropics, he moves about, taking in all the
new construction before returning to his hut. But here’s Rowahirawa
approaching. What’s this son-of-a-bitch been doing all day? “Shaki, you’ve
started asking for names for your white leaves,” he says, “names of people here
and their fathers and grandfathers in hedu.”

Ordinarily, Lac would be worried about Rowahirawa
mentioning his work like this, expecting the comment to be followed by a
warning that he must desist. But he sees in the waning light that his sioha
friend is sporting a toothy grin, like he may at any moment erupt into
laughter.

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